Back up mx servers

It is important to realize that whoever does your backup for you can easily read your email. Likewise you can read their email in turn.

Also, if you have amazing super-duper spam/virus scanning filters in your email setup but your back-mx does not, you may lose some effectiveness of the filters on your primary MX server. (Spammers love to send mails to backup MX servers, because rarely do they have all the same filtering components the primary does)

i relalise that they will be able to read my email, but since it is a backup, im assuming they wont have my mail, unless something goes down on my end.. which im hopig doesnt happen but as a last resort.. id like my mail to be somewhere rather then getting shipped to /dev/null when there is no were to send it to.. its primarly a last resort kinda thing

Remember, mails stay queued for ~3 days.

The problem is that if you set up a backup MX server, spammers will tend to just send to that server, not the primary server. Which, oddly enough, hasn't been packaged as a spam detection algorythm.

But, yeah, a lot of folks feel that backup MX is not worth bothering with anymore.

Yes, the guy who runs your backup MX could read your mail, but so could the sysadmins of any gateway through which it passes and any bad guy with root access to a machine on any network segment it traverses. If your email isn't encrypted, someone other than you or your correspondent may read it.

I think that backup MX is worthwhile, particularly for a Linode. Many of us use our Linode as a platform for learning and experimenting, and it's nice to have the mail go somewhere if you have to take your Linode down to fix a screw up. Even an afternoon spent fixing/reinstalling stuff you broke means your correspondents start getting annoying little messages about 'mail could not be delivered for the last n hours'

Sure, spammers pound my backup MX (Zoneedit), but the only checking that I miss out on when mail comes via the backup is the stuff postfix does based on the IP and host address of the machine that is connecting to it. This marginally increases the load on the Linode, since instead of being rejected during the delivery connection, the spam is rejected further along the delivery process.

I use Zoneedit as my backup MX as well. With the reliability here I'm not sure it's absolutely needed, but it does mean I can feel comforatable going on vacation.

Zoneedit's backup MX is so cheap that it's not really worth the trouble to setup your own arrangement.